13 minutes of Obsidian's cancelled Aliens RPG

While Aliens fans lick the acid from wounds inflicted by Colonial Marines, thirteen minutes of gameplay from a development version of Obsidian Entertainment's cancelled RPG Aliens: Crucible have surfaced. It's clearly not finished, but if you want to squint and daydream about what could have been, please do.

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While Aliens fans lick the acid from wounds inflicted by Colonial Marines, 13 minutes of gameplay from a development version of Obsidian Entertainment's cancelled squad-based RPG Aliens: Crucible have surfaced. It's clearly not finished, but if you want to squint and daydream about what could have been, please do.

At least part of the video picked up by Unseen64 shows a build dated December 22, 2008--not long before it was cancelled. A short snippet from an earlier build leaked out in 2010, but this is the longest and most recent look we've had.

The video, a composite of several sections potentially from different builds, shows character creation, skill trees, controlling a squad, dialogue options with consequences, QTEs, a variety of weapons, hacking and cutting doors, the Queen, and an awful lot of aliens being shot.

Crucible was announced alongside Colonial Marines in 2006, but while we saw a fair bit of Gearbox's FPS, Sega had little to say about the RPG. A former Obsidian employee said in February 2009 that it had been cancelled, but publisher Sega didn't officially announce that until June 2009 and offered no explanation for dropping it.

Obsidian CEO Feargus Urquhart commented in 2010 that Crucible "looked and felt like it was ready to ship" when Sega cancelled the game. While the leaked footage may resemble some manner of finished game, it doesn't look like a particularly good one--not to read too much into a dev build. Still, that little problem didn't stop Sega from releasing Colonial Marines.

From The Chatty
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    February 20, 2013 6:00 AM

    Alice O'Connor posted a new article, 13 minutes of Obsidian's cancelled Aliens RPG.

    While Aliens fans lick the acid from wounds inflicted by Colonial Marines, thirteen minutes of gameplay from a development version of Obsidian Entertainment's cancelled RPG Aliens: Crucible have surfaced. It's clearly not finished, but if you want to squint and daydream about what could have been, please do.

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      February 20, 2013 6:31 AM

      Personally, I'm not going to miss this one after viewing that but then I think Aliens just has to be a first person game. It's just a shame we'll have to wait a very long time before another arrives, cheers gearbox :(

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        February 20, 2013 6:45 AM

        its for the best, i rather have an obsidian game for the pc that draws from their core competency and aims to be a spiritual successor to planescape torment with folks from black isle studios and troika doing what they want to do instead of them having to work contract on some sega sponsored console rpg. i was not to fond of aplha protocol either.

        what i'm saying is yay project eternity, all hail kickstarter. but yeah fuck gearbox either way. they ruined the franchise for years to come. even if another studio started working today on the game it would take at least 3 years to get a game shipping.

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          February 20, 2013 7:16 AM

          It's more fucked than that. How many Matrix games have you seen lately? Without there being a new film to breathe life into the franchise this could be the coffin nail.

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      February 20, 2013 6:43 AM

      This actually looked like it could've been a neat game in some respects - I liked the squad management components.

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      February 20, 2013 6:48 AM

      Yeah, that's definitely not ready to ship. Still looks kind of cool though, even if being able to take that damage from an alien and still live kind of destroys the tension that the movies had.

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      February 20, 2013 7:02 AM

      We've got one bad infestation here...

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      February 20, 2013 7:13 AM

      I love RPG's and Aliens RPG would be boss.
      This looks a little rough around the edges and it was a game conceived a few years ago. So some leeway has to be given but I would love and RPG in this universe. However this looks to be on par with the disaster they just released.

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      February 20, 2013 8:13 AM

      That's rough, I love Obsidian but I don't know if they could ever polish this game to where it needs to be even with all the time and money in the world.

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      February 20, 2013 10:37 AM

      There was an old Aliens game on the C64. If I remember right, it wasn't all that great either.

      http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKq1b9CzToE

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        February 20, 2013 11:01 AM

        Still scared the fuck out of me when I was 6.

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      February 20, 2013 10:51 AM

      Looks like it was cancelled for good reason.

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      February 20, 2013 10:55 AM

      It definitely looks like an early build.

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      February 22, 2013 6:34 AM

      How flat and boring :( What happens with this IP FFS? Its like.. doomed.

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      March 3, 2013 10:21 AM

      It could have been decent, if they made it like Mass Effect, but in the Alien Universe.

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